


always sung alone

by maplemood



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Minor Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:47:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23621809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: Marilka doesn’t take to shame easily. Or regret. She never has.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 38





	always sung alone

For as long as she lives—and she will live years upon years—Marilka of Blaviken will remember the witcher from Rivia. She’ll remember the look on his face in the square that day when she spoke, when he raised it to hers.

_ Get out of Blaviken, Geralt. Don’t ever come back. _

For years Marilka holds that look close in case there’s ever a time when she’s expected to cry but can’t—her sister’s wedding, her mother’s funeral. But the truth is she cries easily these days: once for a beggar driven out of town, pelting her neighbors with curses as furiously as they pelted his back with stones, once for a nest of field mice crushed beneath a gardening hoe. Marilka has softened. Or perhaps she wasn’t ever that hard to begin with.

Geralt, she thinks now, saw through her false bravado and shameless begging, which is why of course he never would have taken her on as his apprentice or anything else. By the same token, Marilka has to believe he saw through her posturing in the square and understood the truth behind her words.

_ They’ll kill you if you stay. _ He’ll _ kill you. Geralt. Don’t ever come back. _

Marilka never goes back to Master Irion’s tower after that day. She brings him no more dogs and certainly no more witchers. She refuses to see him again.

_ Oh, but you couldn’t possible have hurt him, Marilka. Remember what I told you—witchers feel nothing. _

Her throat had stung as though Renfri’s blade still pressed against it. Her mouth had soured. Her guts had roiled, gone sick and soupy. 

_ You saw how he butchered that girl. Like a beast, Marilka. His kind are no better than wolves. _

Whatever dawned across Geralt’s blood-spattered face was far from nothing. Marilka’s no fool. She saw something of it in the beggar who hobbled out of Blaviken forever, bruised and battered, and something else again in the field mice, the tender, bloody mess of them curled in the slashed leftovers of their nest. Defeated and unguarded, naked at the bone—it fills her with shame. 

Marilka doesn’t take to shame easily. Or regret. She never has.

This shame, though, she holds on to. For years upon years afterwards Marilka nurses it as the only apprentice their village herbalist agrees to train, as a bride on her wedding day, as a mother tunelessly humming simple songs to lull the babies to sleep. She keeps an ear out for the rich and the strange, and the new, though it takes a dog’s age for new songs to reach Blaviken. 

All the same. She listens; she tries. 

“We sing for the White Wolf,” Marilka tells Lena and Little Libushe, “So that if he ever rides this way again, he’ll know we haven’t forgotten him.”

“And what else? Mommy—”

“Shut up, Libushe!”

“You shut—”

“Hush.” She separates them, pulling Libushe onto her lap. “Wherever he is,” Marilka says, and the skin of her throat prickles, even now, “and however lonely he is, the White Wolf knows his songs are sung across the Continent. Even in its remotest corners. Even here. And we can hope that comforts him.”


End file.
